Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle (63 page)

* * *

The Cadillac pulled up at a ranch house outside of town. It was well maintained and large, surrounded by what had probably been farmland, but was now little more than a giant lawn of sorts. It was a dry land, and the only vegetation Ned could see for miles were small, scrubby bushes and short, hardy-looking trees. Someone had planted and maintained a few flower beds in front of the pale-blue house's large veranda, and the splash of color looked out of place in the desert.

Even more color—actually a ridiculous cavalcade of many colors—could be seen at the side of the house where a number of SUVs and customized pickup trucks were parked. When they arrived in the house's driveway, the young driver got out of the car and rummaged through the cargo area. He returned with a T-shirt, a plaid collared shirt, jeans, socks, and cowboy boots. He threw them in the back seat to Ned and told him to get dressed.

Ned put on the clothes as quickly as he could. It was awkward, changing in the back of an SUV, even a big one, and the clothes were all the wrong sizes. The shirts were too small and the jeans so huge that Ned had to hold them up with his hands. At least the boots were close to a fit.

Once outside the Cadillac, Ned followed his rescuers up to the house where they were greeted at the door by two men with assault rifles; one of them was wearing a Sonora state-police-uniform shirt and pants with cowboy boots and a baseball cap. They grinned and shot the breeze with Ned's group and the one in the uniform said something in Spanish about Ned that was just a little too quick for him to catch. All the others laughed. Ned assumed it was about his clothes.

Inside the house, Ned felt a brush of air-conditioning. In the front vestibule, a couple of chatting teenagers fell silent the moment they saw Ned's party walk through. They entered a main room, which was dominated by a group of six men playing poker. Each player had a couple of bottles of beer in front of him, and one man was smoking a cigar. Ned noticed the Cuban label that hadn't been removed. The table was littered with piles of U.S. currency, enough to buy a small house in the suburbs. There were two young women sitting on a couch behind the table. They pointed and giggled when Ned came in.

All the men started talking in Spanish. Finally, the man at the head of the table silenced them with a hand gesture. He was unremarkable looking. Short and ugly with a very prominent set of eyebrows that Ned guessed probably made him look angry even when he wasn't. He barely glanced at Ned, instead looking at the fat man, who was panting from standing for so long. “Ratón, you know what to do,” he said angrily.

The fat man then grabbed both of Ned's hands and pulled them behind his back. The other man from the car, the one in the cowboy hat, then put handcuffs on his wrists. They led him back outside and around the house into a large field. They took him to an area roughly the size of a bedroom that had been cleared of shrubbery. Beside him, he saw a freshly filled-in hole, about eight feet by eight feet. His stomach sank as he realized it was almost certainly a recently filled grave. He looked around. The fat man, El Ratón, was right behind him. With him were five other young men, one wearing a Federales uniform. They were all armed, three with assault rifles, two with handguns.

El Ratón pushed him down to his knees. One of the guys with a handgun ran in front of him and pulled out a lime-green Flip video camera and started recording. “My face isn't in the shot, is it?” asked El Ratón. The young man assured him it was not.

Then El Ratón hit Ned in the back of the head and barked: “What is your name?”

Ned answered instinctively. “Alfredo Duncan.”

“Liar!” shouted El Ratón. “Who do you work for?”

“Ho-Holsamex.”

“Not the DEA?”

“No, Holsamex!” Ned was shouting now, too.

El Ratón smacked him in the back of the head again. “Liar! We know how to find out the truth!” he shouted, growing hoarse. “Who do you work for? The Sonora Cartel? The Caro Quinteros?”

“No, Holsamex.”

Ned could feel the barrel of a gun pressed against the back of his skull. Another interrogator had taken over from El Ratón. “We know you work for the DEA!” This new, much more malevolent-sounding voice shouted. “Just tell us you work for the DEA!”

“I don't! I don't!”

As the gun's barrel pressed deeper into the back of his skull, Ned heard a dull, electronic rendition of a popular Mexican disco song. The guy in front of him, who had been recording everything, reached in his pocket and pulled out a cell phone. He answered it, listened for a few moments, his eyes on Ned's the whole time. “Okay,” he finally said. “El Orangután says he's okay. That he is for Poco Loco.”

One of the men offered his hand to Ned, and helped him back to the ground. They didn't say anything to him, just led him back to the house.

Driving all the way to Brooklyn with Agent Carly O'Malley was not too bad, Meloni thought to himself. Unlike most other agents, she didn't talk about much aside from what they were working on, and that was okay with him. She was very serious about her work, and he respected that. O'Malley had been something of a rising star in the agency, until a child pornography case her task force had been investigating for six months fell apart because one of her agents had gotten a bit rough with the ringleader. She took the blame and the fallout was enormous. Since then, O'Malley had been working her way back up the food chain by taking lesser assignments and working for progressively more senior agents. That she and Meloni were seen as outsiders made them natural allies, and he was relieved to be working with her, rather than having to watch his back all the time.

She was not at all unpleasant to be with on the trip, but Meloni could tell that she hated being the junior agent on any assignment. Since O'Malley never spoke with other agents about her private life, more than a few men around the office had concluded she was a lesbian; when she eventually opened up about an interest in baseball, the rumors about her spread further. Knowing she was being talked about in that way made her withdraw further, sharing even less about herself with other agents.

Meloni knew that a lot of the guys accuse any woman who isn't interested in their advances lesbians, so he didn't really give it much thought. He knew that at least one other agent had asked her out—she certainly wasn't unattractive with red hair and blue eyes—and she had shot him down. Since she knew that Meloni's interest in her was purely professional, the two of them got along well.

He was happy when she pulled out a Stieg Larsson novel and began to read, because it allowed him to go over the details of the investigation in his own head. The goal of the New York trip was to meet with the girl who turned up at the Javits the day Kuzik's body was discovered.

Hers was a complicated story. The girl, who gave her name as Sopho and her age as eleven, originally claimed to be an orphan, but later relented and told the investigators that her parents had told her that she was going to visit her rich uncle in Russia for a few weeks, and gave her to a large man with a beard to take her there. The man—who was very fat and wore a suit—drove her in a car bigger than she had ever seen to a strange and dirty town called Supsa that smelled really bad, like fire and chemicals. He gave her to another man (“he was brown like he came from India or Africa”), who put her onto a very large ship. Once aboard, she was locked in a cabin with nothing to do for a very long time. The only people she ever saw on the voyage were an old man who brought her food three times a day, and another man who brought her some water-color paints and brushes one day. Aside from that she was very bored.

When they landed, she thought she was in Russia, even though she knew you did not have to cross the sea to get there. But when she saw some black people and an American flag, she knew she had gone across the Atlantic, and it was then she became afraid that her parents had lied to her. She was given to two more men—one funny little one who was “an Arab or Turk or something” and a much bigger, more serious one who was obviously American. Neither of them spoke much of her language (“just ‘hello' and ‘good-bye' and things like that”), but they seemed to like her. She was shocked at how big and busy everything was. There were so many cars, she wondered if it was a holiday. While she was trying to figure out what was going on, the big man drove off with her and left the little man behind. That scared her, but she realized she had no place else to go so she stayed quiet. She stayed with the big man and they drove all over America, at first in a big shiny truck and then later on a very loud and old motorcycle. The big man took her to a huge city where there were millions of people everywhere. They went into a massive glass building, almost like a rectangular castle, that was full of people and what looked like small stores. She was in a crowd, heard some gunshots, then screaming, and saw people running. When it was all over, Andersson was holding her hand and taking her to a policeman.

Since she had refused to give the names of her parents or even what town she was from (and nobody claimed her), the Georgian embassy was at odds with what to do with her. While various American and Georgian authorities were trying to decide whose problem she was, a temporary solution was reached for her. The local Georgian consulate partnered with the New York State office of Children and Family Services and St. Nino's Georgian Orthodox Church to set her up with a Georgian American family in Bensonhurst until a permanent solution could be arranged.

As they were headed across the Verrazano Narrows Bridge from Staten Island into Brooklyn, Meloni grinned to himself at the thought that, like everyone else from Boston, he had been trained to hate everything about New York City all his life, but he just couldn't do it. He actually loved the place, the people, the food, the atmosphere, everything about it. O'Malley had emerged from her book to look around. She was originally from Long Island, so this part of the trip was very familiar to her. They had a brief conversation about the neighborhood, and O'Malley said she couldn't believe that even Bensonhurst wasn't immune to the hipster invasion that had been taking over Brooklyn.

The GPS took them into almost the center of Bensonhurst, on 79th Street near 18th Avenue. There was a high-rise apartment building on the corner, and the house they were looking for was the third of four identical red-brick row houses that looked like they were built in the 1960s.

The house looked pleasant enough, with a small, well-kept yard behind a short brick fence. Unlike many of the more elaborate houses around it, there were no crosses or icons of saints or statues of the Virgin Mary, just a simple flower garden and a small red-and-white Georgian flag sticker on the door. There was also a red-and-white van outside with the name Kwik-Key Locksmithing painted on it with a 718 phone number.

A man of about forty-five answered the door and introduced himself as Murray Khizanshvili, and told Meloni that his real name was Murtaz, but everyone in America always called him Murray. He was short and dark with a pleasant demeanor. He had a small face dominated by thick eyebrows, and he wore rimless glasses, and a big smile. Khizanshvili brought the agents into a dark but pleasant living room, made cozy by two low, brightly patterned couches. On one of them sat a woman of about forty who Meloni assumed was Murray's wife, Gvantsa, with whom he had arranged the meeting over the phone. She looked like most of the other women they had seen in the area: medium-length dark hair and a thick build, but didn't dress quite so flashily as most of her neighbors.

Beside her was Sopho, the girl they had come to see. The child in the pictures Melnoni had been given had grown up; her face and body had filled out and she looked very much like the healthy twelve-year-old she now was. Her short stringy hair had grown long and thick, and she had dyed it reddish-brown. She was wearing a bright-green, long-sleeved Abercrombie & Fitch jersey, dark jeans, and a little bit of makeup. She was polite, but neither warm nor forthcoming.

After a brief discussion with the Khizanshvilis, the agents asked to be alone with Sopho. Before they could ask her any questions, she interrupted them. “First of all it's Sophia now, not Sopho,” she said sternly. “And I have told you guys everything I know over and over again.” Meloni was surprised at how well she spoke English after such a short time in America.

“I know,” said Meloni in a way he hoped she would see as kindly. “I have the complete report right here—I have read, reread, and memorized every single word you have told the authorities.”

“But we think there's more . . .,” said O'Malley.

Before she could continue, Sopho shouted her down. “There isn't any more! I have told you everything!”

Meloni grinned at her. “You and I both know there's always more; like, how many eleven-year-olds don't remember their hometowns or even their last names?” he asked. After a short pause, he said, “What if I told you that nothing you tell us would be used to help send you back to Georgia?”

“Really? You promise?”

“Really,” he said. “We're the FBI—we don't care where you live—we're looking for someone else.”

“Who?”

“Not you,” he answered. “So, can we just talk?”

“You totally promise that nothing I say will put me back in that place, with those people?”

Meloni grinned. “Totally.”

She smiled nervously. “Okay, I've been lying about my parents—I know their names and where they live. I just don't want to go back.”

O'Malley interjected. “I don't think you understand,” she said. “We're not interested in any of that.”

Sopho looked surprised. “Then what do you want to know?”

“We want to know what happened to you
after
you got off the boat,” Meloni said. “About the two men who picked you up.” He picked up a photograph from the file folder on his lap. “Was this one of them?”

She took the picture from him and looked at it intently and for a very long time. “Yes,” she finally said. “I think he was—the tall one, the American. I think so at least.”

Meloni asked her to describe her trip with him. She was hazy about much of it, but many of the details—her mention of Aiken's SUV, the motorcycle he had sold and then was accused of stealing, her description of the Hawkridge factory where Aiken had worked and to which he had taken her to steal the bike back—confirmed his suspicions. Aiken was clearly the man who picked her up, which indicated that he may have been involved in human trafficking. But a couple of things didn't make sense to him. When women are smuggled either for work or prostitution, they are usually in fairly large groups—at least a dozen. It just doesn't make any economic sense to sneak in one person. And Sopho was too young for much work and, while child prostitutes are commonly trafficked, they almost never come to the United States where cultural disdain and heavy prison sentences make it an extremely dangerous trade. The fact that no family in Georgia had emerged claiming her indicated she wasn't kidnapped for ransom or by a family member. She had said her parents had told her she was visiting an uncle, but it seemed like a story to shut her up while they were getting rid of her.

He asked her about the other man. She told him basically what she had told police and the media several times before. They had no leads on him.

“Did the two men who picked you up know the men on the ship?” he asked.

“The little one did, the big one didn't,” she said. “He didn't say much of anything before the little one left.”

“And did they deliver you to Mr. Andersson?”

Sopho got nervous and bit her lip. “No, I said before, Mr. Andersson had nothing to do with this, he just found me,” she said. “He's a very nice man; he still visits sometimes and brings his daughters. He even bought me an iPad . . .”

O'Malley interrupted. “We know Mr. Andersson very well. We're not trying to get him into any trouble,” she said. “We just want to know if the man in the picture brought you to him.”

“No,” she lied.

* * *

Ned was given a seat at the poker table and one of the women fetched him a cold bottle of beer. Without hesitating, he drank about half of it before setting the bottle shakily back on the table. The other men at the table laughed at him.

The ugly man who had ordered Ned's interrogation smiled at him broadly, revealing a gold tooth. “Sorry about that, my friend, but we did not know who you were,” he said. “And now that we do, you are welcome to stay, but first I have to know a few things.”

Fear gripped Ned's innards again. He was still in shock from his interrogation, and had no idea what was next on this group's agenda.

“First of all, we know you are not a Confederado,” the ugly man said. “Those guys speak with a Veracruz accent, and you . . . well, let's just say you speak Spanish with a Kentucky accent.” The men at the table laughed. One of them threw the remains of a chicken leg at Ned. “El Orangután tells me that you are an American who got into a little trouble with some bad people, and now you are in Mexico hiding from them,” he continued. “Did you not realize that there are lots of bad people in Mexico, too?” His men laughed again. Ned was silent. “It's okay, man, don't worry, you're safe with us, nobody is going hurt you,” the man said, then shouted at one of the women to get Ned a plate of food and another beer. “You'll stay here for a couple of days until we sort things out.” He turned to the other men at the table and asked: “What should we call him?”

A brief discussion revealed that the consensus of opinion was that he was tall, white, and not very smart. One man suggested La Cigüeña (the Stork), but he was shouted down because it sounded too feminine. After much debate, they decided El Espagueti (the Spaghetti) would be more appropriate.

The ugly man laughed and shouted, “Maria, take El Espagueti to his room!”

Before he had even finished, an ordinary-looking girl of about sixteen took Ned's hand and indicated that he should follow her. She took him upstairs. Ned could hear snoring before he reached the top. The stairs led to a corridor with four doorways. At the end was a washroom, which was being cleaned by a girl about the same age as the one who was guiding him, but heavier and less pretty. On the left was a doorway with a thick dusty patterned blanket serving as a door, on the right there was a closed door and another doorway without a door. That was where the snoring he could hear was coming from.

The room was messy, but appeared as though it was cleaned regularly. A young man was sound asleep on one of the two beds, and on the floor beside him were three beer bottles and a shirt. He had attempted to get his pants off, but had only managed to get them down to his knees before giving up or passing out. He did not look to Ned to be very comfortable.